She is not his fantasy. Not at all.
Hell, she was made to be the opposite, his foil, his counterpoint, his balance. He created her to cut him down and cut him off, to punch a much-needed hole in his ego. That is her purpose, a living, breathing conscience.
He's seen his dream girl made flesh, and she was nothing like Claire Saunders. (It would have been so easy to fall in love with Bennet. He was halfway there already. But this is the real world of the Dollhouse, not the client's world, and that would have been too perfect. Too neat and pretty.)
She is not his fantasy, and maybe that's why she slipped under his skin so easily. He didn't create someone he thought he could fall in love with, and he'd even added the safeguards just in case. She was driven to avoid him. The danger was not even on his radar.
A stupid move. Don't take the game for granted. Don't underestimate any piece.
Claire comes back to them on her own, long after they've stopped looking. Her hair has grown long and matted, her skin has gained a layer of dirt, and she definitely has more scars now than when she left.
She's still the most beautiful damn thing he's ever seen in his sad little life.
She sleeps for two days, and he lingers in doorways and hovers in corners while people – nurses and DeWitt and Boyd, mostly – come and go to check on her. He's possibly a creep. He's definitely a fool. His knuckles barely brush against her back, and he silently counts out her vertebrae, onetwothree, until they melt into her hips and the rise and fall of her unconscious breath snaps him out of it and he backs off. He tries to go back to being awkward instead of alarming, but he can't seem to leave the room.
He tells himself this is all brain chemistry: hormones and pheromones and other words he plays with every day. He convinces himself it might not be anything so grand and dramatic as love, that the neurons that fire for hate are maybe close to the ones for love and certainly not far at all from the ones for lust. A standard mix-up. But that would be too easy, too.
Because she is not his fantasy. She's the closest to real he's ever been.